Here I am!

I help non-technical founders start their business, build their product, get their first customers, and grow their technical team. I'm a generalist software engineer and I've worked with many different languages over the past 15 years but my current tool of choice is Ruby on Rails.
I'm also an enthusiastic photographer and a novice archer

Picks of the Week: Draper, Speedo MP3 player, mails_viewer

I always get a little bit jealous listening to various podcasts (Ruby Freelancers / Ruby Rogues) which ask their guests for “picks” every week. Since no one is inviting me a podcast every week, I thought I’d start to share my weekly picks any way. It’ll be a mix of general life stuff, programming stuff and perhaps some photography too.

DraperÂ — a Decorator library for Rails. I was trying to find a decent way to share view logic between a dashboard and a notification email. I thrashed about for a bit and then realised I needed a Presenter-style abstraction. A quick Google brought me to Draper. It’s a nice way of writing view helpers that are loosely tied to your models but without polluting them with view logic.

Speedo MP3 Player — This week I swam 1800m (90 lengths), the first time I’d swam over a mile since I was 11. A main factor in my success has been practice and building up the habit of swimming. And the main factor in that success has been relieving the boredom by listening to podcasts as I swim. Podcasts are probably better than music because they’re easy to ignore, interesting but don’t have a tempo to interrupt your stroke. This MP3 player isn’t perfect (no screen, the buttons can press accidentally, and it’s still a little fiddly) but it generally it works really well. I can hear clearly underwater, the earplugs don’t slip and the cable doesn’t restrict my head movements.

Mails Viewer — a useful Rails engine which captures and displays emails sent by your Rails app in development